I guess we'll see, right? Arguing won't do us any good. People made up their mind a long time ago about Ubuntu. Haters are gonna hate, like my grandmother used to say. Let's see who can get their display server on more machines in the years to come.

I really think it hurts people to know that Canonical might actually pull this off.

Listen it's not about hating or loving. Let's imagine a future where Mir succeeds, there is a good chance that it will be ubuntu centric, just like unity is not available in almost all other distros(exceot arch). When you install chrome or steam on all other distros+de you don't get the extra options that you get when you right click on the launcher in unity, good feature but wasn't able to penetrate into the entire ecosystem. I know this is probable a very bad example but it's one that points in the direction I'm going.

With unity the problem wasn't that serious, but with Mir getting successful, hardware vendors will start favoring Mir and that will create a kind of a lock down as canonical is least bothered with making software that integrates well with other systems. They only care about how well it integrates into ubuntu.

Now doesn't all this seem very similar to the way proprietary vendors behave. My concern is this. Now one wishes for ubuntu to fail, but what if it does in the future? Would you like for a time where all the drivers are made for Mir but Mir is not being used bu most of the people, instead they are forced to use their systems with hacks that keep breaking the system every now and then. The wayland folks are not the makers of a distro, hence they make (or atleast try to make) vendor agnostic software. I'm afraid that can't be said for ubuntu.

From my understanding Mir is GPLv2. Distros should be able to use it if they like, assuming of course that KDE, GNOME, etc, decide to support the display server. If Canonical stops being an organization in the capacity they are now, then it can be forked.

I for one welcome the competition. May the best free display server win.

"Earlier this year however, I discovered that a well-known company had taken the code - disappeared underground with it for several months, improved upon it, utilized the capability in their advertisements and demos and in the end posted the code utilizing their own source control system, detached from any state of that of the upstream project's. Even to the extent some posters around the web thought libhybris was done by that company itself.

That kind of behavior ruined the initial reason I open sourced libhybris in the first place and I was shocked to the point that I contemplated to by default not open source my hobby projects any more. It's not cool for companies to do things like this, no matter your commercial reasons. It ruins it for all of us who want to strengthen the open source ecosystem. We could have really used your improvements and patches earlier on instead of struggling with some of these issues.

But, I will say that their behavior has improved - they are now participating in the project, discussing, upstreaming patches that are useful. And I forgive them because they've changed their ways and are participating sanely now."

So yes, it was developed for Wayland pre-Mir, but development has never stopped. Canonical took it, was a bitch for a while, and promoted it like crazy as their own, before coming to the project and starting to act decently again.